By degrees, Hernández began to contrast his individuality and subjectivity with everything which he had experienced during his socialisation as the impositions of a dominant collective. The individuality of one versus the collective of many is consequently the subtext that runs through all of his exhibitions. As a child of rigid revolutionary upbringing, Hernández was socialised and indoctrinated for a future that never eventuated. The artist’s identity formed in the existential economic struggle of the 1990s. He transformed the omnipresent precariousness of everyday Cuban life into art, ironically regarding the permanent improvisation as absolute and thus deriding all propagandist proclamations of the perfect socialist future…

Excerpts from Socialist Nature or the utopia of the ordinary by Gerhard Obermüller for “Socialist Nature”, book published by DISTANZ Read full text